I Vote

Underneath Everything This watch belonged to my father, the man who adopted me. As the years went by, there were some rocky times, like there is for all of us. I was battling memories I didn't yet know how to live with. Some of my actions were nothing more than momentary lapses of reason. Nothing too serious. Just a young man lashing out at the world now and then, making decisions that would eventually force him to choose how he wanted to live the rest of his life. When I received my CDL certificate at twenty-one, I called my father. He was the one who encouraged me to choose the road as a life. I remember how proud he sounded when he heard the excitement in my voice. I was on my first trip, the first of many to come. I called him from Salmon Arm, British Columbia, with a load of swinging pork bound for Provigo Grocers in Montreal, Quebec. Back home, my old room in the basement had remained open through most of my preteen years and until I left home. While we were talking, Dad was sitting on a sawhorse. A stud was lying on the floor, perpendicular to the outside wall. He lifted it and found some tri-folded pieces of looseleaf. Some poems. A few pieces of short prose. Things I had written and forgotten were there. While we talked, he said he did not want to tell me he had read them. Then he got quiet. After a moment of awkward silence on the phone, he spoke. “Son, I'm very proud of you. I know we've had differences. You've been distant, and you were never much for talking. But it looks like you've been bottling up a lot.” He paused again. “I know you're living one of your dreams, driving truck. But for some strange reason, reading these, I thought: This boy of mine has another dream.” He told me his hands shook a little as he read them. There was something eerie about the words, he said. Something underneath them. Something under the skin. I had never shared it with him or mom. But somehow, it was coming through in those words. Then dad said something I would carry much farther than any load I ever hauled. “I've got a funny feeling you have another dream, and you need to realize it. Even if I'm no longer here, I'll be watching to see you come through on that promise you made to yourself in these pages. I would like to have mom place them in an envelope so you can retrieve them the next time you roll through. Whatever story it is you need to tell, tell it. Maybe someday we can talk about it again.” We never got that someday. When Dad died, I was handed his watch and that envelope. It was still telling time. For years I barely looked at it except to change clothes, and I never looked at the hands. I carried it with me everywhere, until one day, at a rest area, I decided to really look at it over my steering wheel. Those hands stopped long ago. I never replaced the battery. Maybe part of me wasn't ready to. For years, I battled the things I'd buried. I drove the miles. Lived the life. Made mistakes. Got back up. Kept moving. But the other dream stayed where dad had found it all those years before. Underneath everything; waiting. Nearly half a century after some of those first words were written, I finally told the story I had spent most of my life carrying. It took nine long, hard years to put it all on paper. And when I was finished, I picked up my father's watch. I brought it to the jeweler, who placed a new battery in it. In that moment, there in the jewelry store, I froze. The store owner watched as I remembered in silence, hearing the echoes of my father’s words through the phone. The hands began moving. Now the dream was set in motion again. Finally, everything has come to fruition, for me. And for Dad. Now the stories are in the hands of the people I love, the people who have read them, and there for the people who haven't found them yet. Someday I won't be here either. But the words will. Dad's watch is keeping time again. So am I.